Wildfire Smoke: North American Tour 2020
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2020: Good evening, folks! Well, it's finally happened: there was no wildfire smoke over Seattle in July or August of this summer; but while I was visiting my Mom in Crossville, Tennessee in late August/early September, wildfire smoke from multiple directions engulfed the Emerald City. When I flew home on September 7, I changed planes in Denver; as we landed there, there was no mistaking the yellowish haze surrounding that vicinity. At that time, the city was surrounded on nearly all sides by wildfires, and they had the smoky air to prove it (and this was just 24 hours before the city was assaulted by an Arctic snowstorm, and their temperatures plummeted in unprecedented fashion from the 90's down to the 30's, literally overnight). Not long after my connecting flight to Seattle took off, we saw a large wildfire lighting up the darkness through the left-side windows; but there was no way to tell exactly where it was. When we landed at SeaTac Airport, however, we could clearly smell wood smoke in the night sky, though the haze wasn't visible at that hour.
For another two weeks, the Air Quality Index in Seattle was up well over 200, vacillating between Unhealthy and Bloody-Awful, as the public were advised to stay indoors as much as possible, and reminded that our now-fashionable cloth face masks would not protect us against wildfire smoke particulates (you need N95 masks for that). However, we actually had it easy compared with California, Oregon and eastern Washington where my aunt lives; she was reporting AQI's close to 400 (well into the Hazardous range). It's only been in the past week, give or take a day or two, that significant rain and thunderstorms have given the west coast relief from both wildfires and choking levels of wood smoke. Unfortunately, the wildfire smoke hasn't exactly gone away--it's simply headed east. According to this AirNow map of North America, the current situation on the east coast has improved a great deal over the past week or two; but major cities like New York and Boston, until recently, were being inundated by smoke plumes from California, Oregon and Colorado.
Anyway, we here in Seattle can breathe normally again, as of late September. But once I get out of my depressive funk, I intend to get current information on wildfires in Siberia and other Arctic regions; months of abnormally high temperatures from the Arctic Circle northward have generated wildfires, floods, melting glacial ice and amazing finds such as the intact body of a cave bear, recently exposed due to melting permafrost. I've got to start posting here way more often, folks; there's no shortage of climate-related material being generated online on a daily basis. If anything, there's way too much out there to keep adequate track of, and that's also bumming me out.
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